On seeing things differently [1]

This chapter examines a particular contrast between two radically different moralities. It attempts to characterize the nature of the contrast, and to consider how a man might come to change his moral allegiances, to adopt one moral perspective in place of another. In particular, some moral disagreements are so fundamental that they are to be regarded not simply as conflicts between particular moral beliefs but as conflicts between distinct moralities. The chapter establishes the relation between ‘ways of seeing the world’ and specifically moral considerations. The high-level judgments are in effect judgments of approval and disapproval such as ‘Human desires are bad’, ‘Freedom from the power of desires is good’, and these, together with minor premises specifying particular instantiations of ‘desire’, entail various more concrete moral judgments. A morality is somehow grounded in, even if not entailed by, a Weltanschauung might then be interpreted as an argument for some kind of ethical naturalism.

Computer Science · Free Will and Agency · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Political Philosophy and Ethics

• The Humean Female

  Open Access•STEVEN BURNS•Dialogue•1976

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